“That said, I still have a problem with people in a private meeting going out and saying what the president said, when they know, like right now, I just heard that the Panamanian ambassador just quit over this,” the wife of Congressman Sean Duffy (R-WI) continued.

“I mean, it makes our country look bad,” she elaborated. “I think the Democrats, in this case, should have used some discretion. And even if he did say something like that, not repeat it for the benefit of the country.”

Almost forgot, Stormy Daniels denies an affair with Trump, though another porn star came forward and says it's true. And there is a rumor Trump has been having an affair with Omarosa.

The Trump administration on Friday told Kentucky it can go ahead with its controversial Medicaid overhaul ― an initiative that would reduce benefits, require some beneficiaries to work, and generally make it more difficult for people to stay on the program.

Administration officials and their Kentucky counterparts have portrayed the plan as a way to improve the health of low-income residents and encourage self-sufficiency among poor but able-bodied adults. “The result will be a transformational improvement in the overall health of our people and will provide a model for other states to follow,” Matt Bevin, the state’s Republican governor, said at a press conference Friday.

But there’s scant evidence that Kentucky’s changes will have the effects that Bevin and his allies are promising. In fact, of the roughly 95,000 people expected to lose coverage, some will almost surely be people who are working ― or have reasons why they can’t work ― but who failed to satisfy the new system’s paperwork requirements.

Almost by definition, the people likely to lose coverage already have some combination of financial and medical problems, and without coverage, both are likely to get worse. It’s not clear how much this worries Bevin and his allies in Washington ― or whether it worries them at all.

The “**** you, I’ve got mine” crowd which initiated the health care cuts will just blame poor people for the giant social crisis. Some of them will blame people of color or immigrants too.

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The thing is, they will all end up paying for it when the uninsured land in the ER for their medical needs, which will be cost-shifted to everyone else who CAN pay, thereby driving up the price of care for everyone in the state. It's remarkably short-sighted and stupid, but sadly, par for the course these days vis-a-vis Republican policy overall.

Kind of like "more access to birth control = less abortions", but we can't have that because OMG women having consequence-free sexz!!

lol, the link broke because the boards auto-censored the word "****hole" in it. Brilliant.

Here it is:

The president had no respect for Haiti. He could see as well as anyone following the news that the country was a basket case — racked by political unrest, filthy, incapable of handling its own affairs. There was no doubt his opinion of the black republic was informed by his blatant racism, which included praising members of the Ku Klux Klan. He had criticized his predecessors’ foreign wars while running for office. But in the White House, he realized he was willing to flex the country’s muscles abroad, as long as the mission fit his motto: “America first.”

Taking Haiti was a U.S. priority, he decided. The United States would invade.

That president was Woodrow Wilson. The year was 1915. And if that was the beginning of a story you’ve never heard before, you aren’t alone.

Since news broke that Wilson’s unwitting heir, President Trump, called Haiti — along with El Salvador and seemingly all 54 nations in Africa — “****hole countries,” the president’s defenders made it clear not only that they do not know Haiti’s history but also that they’re unaware of their own. As soon as they heard his comments, Trump’s partisans went defensive, claiming that while Trump might have been rude, he was right.

“Trump should ‘vehemently condemn’ the Haitian government for running a ****hole country,” wrote Will Chamberlain, one of the organizers of last year’s inaugural “DeploraBall.”

Some on the right particularly applauded a segment on CNN in which National Review editor Rich Lowry asked political commentator Joan Walsh whether she would “rather live in Norway or Haiti.” It was a reference to Trump’s reported wish that the United States ring in more Nordic immigrants instead of those from Latin America or Africa. Walsh refused to answer, noting she’d never visited either country. Tucker Carlson accused her of dishonesty. “Those places are dangerous, they’re dirty, they’re corrupt and they’re poor,” the Fox News host said, with an indignation Wilson would have admired. “Why can’t you say that?”

Trump’s supporters on cable news appear to believe that they, and he, are brave tellers of unvarnished truths others are too timid or politically correct to say out loud. (Never mind that Trump is a notorious, if not pathological, liar — or that, hours later, he tried weakly to walk back the “****hole” remark after his favorite TV show told him to.)

But in reality, they don’t know many truths at all. To rail against poverty in countries such as Haiti and argue that it’s some naturally occurring, objective reality ignores why that poverty exists and what the United States’s role has been in creating it. And ignoring that means not only making bad and hateful decisions today but risks repeating the errors of the past.

***

Haiti was founded Jan. 1, 1804, by people of African descent who were tired of being slaves. They fought and won a revolution against France, ultimately defeating an expeditionary force of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, then the most powerful in the world.

France fought so hard to keep the colony because it was basically the Saudi Arabia of coffee and sugar at the time, providing the majority of both commodities consumed in Europe. The money it generated fueled the entire French empire. But it was made with blood. The slave regime necessary to produce those crops was so deadly that 1 in 10 enslaved Africans kidnapped and brought to the island died each year. As historian Laurent Dubois has noted, the French decided that it was cheaper to bring in new slaves than to keep the ones they had alive.

As soon as Haiti was free, the world’s most powerful empires did everything they could to undermine it. France refused to acknowledge the new nation existed. In the United States — then the only other independent country in the Americas — President Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, was uninterested in seeing a free black nation succeed nearby. The slaveholding powers refused to set up official trade with Haiti, forcing the country into predatory relationships. Haiti’s independence remained a cautionary tale U.S. slavers used to counter abolitionists until the Civil War.

France finally offered much-needed diplomatic recognition in 1825, at gunpoint. King Charles X demanded the Haitian government pay restitution of 150 million gold francs — billions of dollars in today’s money — to French landowners still angry about the loss of their land and the Haitians’ own bodies in the war. If they didn’t pay, he would invade.

Haiti’s leaders agreed. They spent the next decades raiding their own coffers and redirecting customs revenue to paying France for the independence they had already won, ravaging the economy. By the 1880s, Haiti had paid what France had wanted. But now it owed huge sums to foreign banks, from which it had borrowed heavily to make ends meet. In the early 20th century, much of that debt belonged to banks in the United States. Americans had also established extensive business interests in Haiti, exporting sugar and other commodities.

The United States, meanwhile, was looking to expand. Starting in 1898, we began using our military to secure new territory and markets overseas. By 1914, we had annexed the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and other islands in the Pacific. In the Caribbean, we had Puerto Rico and a permanent base in Cuba at Guantanamo Bay. The Marine Corps had also helped carve out a new Central American country, Panama, in exchange for rights to dig a canal providing a trade route to Asia — and the United States invaded Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere.

Haiti was next. Haiti’s politics, roiled by the economic turmoil caused by the debt, were in a tailspin. Presidents were repeatedly assassinated and governments overthrown. The banks demanded payment; U.S. businessmen wanted more security and control. Newspapers had been paving the way for U.S. public opinion — a New York Times dispatch in 1912 declared, “Haitians acknowledge the failure of a ‘Black Republic’ and look forward to coming into the Union.”

In late 1914, U.S. Marines came ashore in Port-au-Prince, marched into the national reserve and carried out all the gold. It was hauled back to the National City Bank in New York — known as Citibank today. Months later, declaring his concern that European powers, especially Germany, might gain a foothold in the Caribbean (even though they were all busy with World War I), Wilson ordered an invasion, then a full occupation.

The U.S. flag was run up Haiti’s government buildings. The Haitian government and armed forces were dissolved. For the next 19 years, the United States ruled Haiti. U.S. Marines fought a bloody counterinsurgency campaign to stamp out resistance. The Haitian government, constitution and army were disbanded and replaced with new U.S.-friendly ones. Intending to embark on a major public works program, the Marines instituted a system, drawn from Haitian law, called the corvée, in which peasants were essentially re-enslaved. Many of the occupation’s leaders were explicit white supremacists who used lessons they had learned instituting Jim Crow at home to create new, American forms of discrimination in Haiti. One major organizer was Col. Littleton W.T. Waller, a child of antebellum Virginia who assured his friend Col. John A. Lejeune — the future commandant of the Marine Corps: “I know the n—– and how to handle him.”

Not all Americans were fans of the colonial regime in Haiti. Anti-imperialist lawmakers, journalists and organizations including the NAACP protested, held hearings and wrote screeds against the occupation. But most Americans, then as now, were essentially unaware. As reports of massacres and other abuses mounted, though, embarrassment grew. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had served in the occupation of Haiti as assistant secretary of the Navy, came to office promising to end U.S. imperial policies in this hemisphere. The occupation ended in 1934. Haiti had some new roads and buildings, a legacy of scars and abuse and a new U.S.-made economic and political system that would keep wreaking havoc over the decades to follow.

In 1957, a U.S.-trained physician, François Duvalier, came to power. Known as Papa Doc, he was a black nationalist who positioned himself in part as an heir to the Haitian Revolution and an opponent of U.S. imperialism, but he also knew how to manage a nearby superpower. U.S. presidents gave him, and his son who succeeded him, support at key moments (when they weren’t trying to sponsor coups against him), until the dictatorship ended in 1986.

***

So in light of all that history, to be convinced that Haiti just happens to be a failed “****hole” where no one would want to live, you’d have to know nothing about how Haitians view their country and themselves. You’d have to know nothing about the destructive U.S. trade policies that continued past the end of the dictatorship, destroying trade protections and, with them, local industries and agriculture. You’d have to not know about the CIA’s role in the 1991 coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, or the U.S. invasions in 1994 and 2004. You’d have to know nothing about why the United States sponsored and took the leading role in paying for a U.N. “stabilization mission” that did little but keep a few, often unpopular, presidents in power and kill at least 10,000 people by introducing cholera to Haiti for the first time. And you’d have to not understand the U.S. role in the shambolic response to the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake — which was a mess, but possibly not in the way that you think.

Haiti is indeed a difficult place to live for many of the people who live there. Poverty is rampant. There is no good sanitation system, in part because the same international system that introduced cholera in 2010 steadfastly refuses to meet its promises to pay to clean it up. (Before the outbreak, the United States withheld funds to pay for water and sanitation infrastructure for more than 10 years for purely political reasons.) After centuries of exploitation and abuse, the best hope for many Haitians is to move away — and suddenly encountering infrastructure and opportunities, they thrive. For many migrants, the ultimate goal is to earn enough money to retire, build a home in Haiti and go back.

In trying to walk back his slur Friday, Trump insisted that he “has a wonderful relationship with Haitians.” There is no evidence of that. As he decided to move forward with forcing the deportation of tens of thousands of Haitians allowed to take refuge after the 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s leading newspaper pronounced him the country’s “worst nightmare.” Last summer, he reportedly said all Haitians have AIDS — a slur that cuts deep in the Haitian American psyche. And now this.

I lived in Haiti for 3½ years, by choice. I saw many people struggling, many beautiful and terrible sights, and lived through some of the hardest days of my life. I learned a lot about the complicated relationship between that country and ours — the ways in which our power can be used for good, and to do incredible harm. Many people pointed out this week that Haitians have been through far worse than a racist president calling their country a “****hole.” The question is whether, knowing the truth, we all want to go through it again.

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Really disgusting. Both we and France owe Haiti billions if not more. Thieving scum.

Oh, Jesus. If I had been in Hawaii when that warning went off I would have **** myself. Because we're at the place in the world right now where I would not have hesitated at believing it. And that's really sad.

... not because of the tax bill, though. The GOP is getting the IRS to change the withholding amounts, but most people are then going to be getting less back in their refund as well.
So why do it at all? Because people aren't going to be getting their 2018 tax returns until after the 2018 elections. Expect Fox News to have an endless parade of stories touting the 'increased paychecks'.

Didn't she hook up with the first ever reality TV villain Puck on that season of Real World? That one will always haunt her! God it's really sad to that I remember that (I was in high school back then) and I admit it out loud LOL! Would it be worst to say I meant a few of the cast members back in the day as well via mutual friends??

And Bannon testify before the HC should be a real hoot. I am sure Mueller will be dying to get him under the light as well though Pence so far is not on Bob's radar which I find interesting. Mike was always their Phillip Green figure from Casino, their squeaky clean guy. But who pushed for Mike to be on the running mate even though Trump wanted Chris Christie in the worst way possible? Paul Manafort. I always assume that just like Phllip Green in Casino, their squeaky clean guy wasn't Mr. Clean after all. Perhaps that was just a random thing everything we know about Mike is that he is way too straight laced to get involved with true shannigans like that. He might turn a blind eye to what is going on but to be really involved seems like a scretch perhaps for the choir boy.

Trump had no choice to recertified the Iranian deal in place thanks to all the protests there. Had he hadn't then the current regime could make us out to be the boogy man as always and everyone would rally behind them. I also think/hope/prey that Mattis and others around him who can chew bubble gum and walk at the same time explained to him that we have enough issues especially with the Korean peninsula being extremely votaile therefore kicking another hornet's ness in Iran when we don't have to is actually very sound policy. My question is then how long did it take them to explain that to Trump considering it took Paul Ryan 30 minutes to explain how the FISA really works? My guess Secretary Mattis & Co. spent quite a bit of "executive time" explaining that all to Donald.

And yeah the Medicad thing sucks but I honestly think like most of what Trump has tried will blow it up in his face.

1. It really only going to effect red states.
2. Trump is going to lose it when he realizes, surprise most Medicad receipents who can work do. It will be like the whole "voter fraud" fiasco. The narrative will meet reality and he will flip his lid LOL!

Didn't she hook up with the first ever reality TV villain Puck on that season of Real World? That one will always haunt her! God it's really sad to that I remember that (I was in high school back then) and I admit it out loud LOL! Would it be worst to say I meant a few of the cast members back in the day as well via mutual friends??

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I think I was in middle school when I first watched it. Pedro would be so disappointed in how she's acting now.

Not only would Pedro would been disappointed in how she is acting now, Rachel from 1994 would smack her on upside of the head for it too LOL! She always been touted herself as a Republican but it's one thing to be a big Jack Kemp backer (like she was on the show) to now literally losing your soul for Trump. Where it all went wrong? I don't know. I honestly think Joe Biden said it best. It all began the moment Newt got the gavel ironically right when that show took place. Him and along with Rush Limbaugh really began warping a lot of GOP minds back in those days and it's just gotten so so so so so so so so so much worst. Both sides IMHO have gotten really out of control with a lot of stuff but the current GOP is a couple steps away from wanting America in "The Man in the High Castle"....in some ways they are already there.

And I will PM about it since it's so off topic and pretty sure nobody else will want to hear!

The fake incoming ICBM alert will end up being one of the defining stories of life under the Trump administration. Fake news. Real panic. Governments react to Trump arbitrarily shaking up the global order to satisfy his compulsive urges. It's the kind of reality check that Trump voters need. How would you feel if you were told, right now, at this very moment, that an incoming nuke was headed your way? Literally everyone in the state of Hawaii now knows what that feels like.

Oh, Jesus. If I had been in Hawaii when that warning went off I would have **** myself. Because we're at the place in the world right now where I would not have hesitated at believing it. And that's really sad.

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I am in Hawaii and imagine waking up at 8:07 AM due to your phone buzzing with a message that this is not a drill and there's a ballistic missile incoming. And in theory a ballistic missile from Asia could be here in 20 minutes. I was ready to grab my wallet and what supplies I could carry and run, although there were a few signs that this was a false alarm (the regular sirens weren't going off, nothing on the Internet about war breaking out, etc.). Right now the local news stations are still reporting on the reactions (details are still emerging, some sort of daily internal test at Civil Defense accidentally leaked out, hence the widespread panic, when the military is supposed to find out first and then tell the civilian emergency agency). Not to mention why it took almost 40 minutes before our phones got a new message that it was a false alarm/mistake (not like most of the local population follow the Civil Defense twitter account which updated faster).

Living in the Pacific didn't seem quite so dangerous 10 years ago. Now... well, everyone is more jumpy. Tsunami warnings are one thing, at least that's relatively easy to understand (head away from the coastline), ballistic missile, who knows where it would hit. Accidents like this definitely don't help. North Korea is worrisome, and Hawaii is relatively close to it (well, closer than the east coast definitely). Its not like I remember Pearl Harbor, though there's still quite a big naval and marine base on island of course, but I think I've read enough history to know that war should be avoided. Which is why I hate hearing so much bluster when there seems to be so little understanding of the cost and consequences.

Oh, Jesus. If I had been in Hawaii when that warning went off I would have **** myself. Because we're at the place in the world right now where I would not have hesitated at believing it. And that's really sad.

Click to expand...

I am in Hawaii and imagine waking up at 8:07 AM due to your phone buzzing with a message that this is not a drill and there's a ballistic missile incoming. And in theory a ballistic missile from Asia could be here in 20 minutes. I was ready to grab my wallet and what supplies I could carry and run, although there were a few signs that this was a false alarm (the regular sirens weren't going off, nothing on the Internet about war breaking out, etc.). Right now the local news stations are still reporting on the reactions (details are still emerging, some sort of daily internal test at Civil Defense accidentally leaked out, hence the widespread panic, when the military is supposed to find out first and then tell the civilian emergency agency). Not to mention why it took almost 40 minutes before our phones got a new message that it was a false alarm/mistake (not like most of the local population follow the Civil Defense twitter account which updated faster).

Living in the Pacific didn't seem quite so dangerous 10 years ago. Now... well, everyone is more jumpy. Tsunami warnings are one thing, at least that's relatively easy to understand (head away from the coastline), ballistic missile, who knows where it would hit. Accidents like this definitely don't help. North Korea is worrisome, and Hawaii is relatively close to it (well, closer than the east coast definitely). Its not like I remember Pearl Harbor, though there's still quite a big naval and marine base on island of course, but I think I've read enough history to know that war should be avoided. Which is why I hate hearing so much bluster when there seems to be so little understanding of the cost and consequences.